No Amount Of Cheating Was Going To Save Them
Republicans could not have been more wrong about the 2024 American electorate
The level of panic evident in the American right's last-ditch efforts to box Democrats out of power by any laughably unconstitutional means necessary told me all I needed to know about the outcome of the 2026 midterms.
It was over before it began.
There was simply no way, as I blogged about a couple times this year, that the Trump regime and the traitorous anti-constitutional Supreme Court majority would make such enormous efforts to cheat if they didn't understand the mood of the electorate and how badly they had overplayed their hand after the illusion that was the 2024 election.
Denny Carter
I hope historians and political scientists are clear about what Republicans and their SCOTUS allies did in the lead-up to the party's midterm annihilation. They pulled the guts out of the Voting Rights Act. They told elected Republicans in every state to go ahead of create the most racist-ass electoral maps anyone has ever seen. Do Jim Crow, 21st Century style: This was the message passed down from the president and his regime and John Roberts and Sam Alito and the rest.
And they still got their dicks kicked in.
The immediate regret of the American public at the start of the president's second term set the scene for his first two years in office, and culminated with the biggest midterm sweep since at least 1994, maybe ever depending on how a handful of congressional races turn out in the next few days. We saw that regret manifest as early as April 2025 in huge Democratic turnout to defeat Elon Musk's Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate. A state that had fallen for Trump's bullshit immediately said no, we don't like this at all. Let's make it right.
Denny Carter
I was confident that no gerrymander would keep Republicans locked into power, even in Texas, which has been something akin to a totalitarian state for three decades of iron-fisted GOP rule (it's why I spent a good chunk of my book on the democratization of Texas). All those gerrymanders – all that racist cheating – was done under the absurdist notion that the 2024 Republican electorate was going to hold in 2026 and beyond. They had assumed young men and Latinos and other traditionally blue demographics had made a permanent shift to the right.
That was never, ever going to be the case. When the price of shit didn't change, and when the normies who voted Republican in 2024 saw what an ethnic cleansing campaign really looked like, it would be over. There would be a political opportunity for pro-democracy forces in an age of fascist domination. The normies would be in the market for a new savior. The 2024 electorate was a ghost, hardly there at all. Maybe you saw it out of the corner of your eye; then it was gone forever. It shattered within the first few months of 2025. Democrats were able to pick up the pieces of that temporarily fascist electorate and build shocking congressional majorities that could be the start of something good, something republic saving.
Cheating in politics can work. We know that. We've seen that. But when everyone fucking hates you and wants nothing more than your political demise, when the public is disgusted by the cultural norms you've created and the hate and ugliness you've spread and the prices you never addressed, no scheme will save you. Many of those GOP gerrymanders look an awful lot like dummymanders today.
Sometimes cheaters do not prosper. Sometimes they get their dicks kicked all the way in.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
